On Trash and Human Flourishing: Thoughts from Wendell Berry and Dorothy L. Sayers

In 2005, Casting Crowns released a song called “While You Were Sleeping.” In it is the lyric, “United States of America, looks like another silent night, as we’re sung to sleep by philosophies that save the trees and kill the children.” Christian teenagers of the 1990s may be familiar with this way of thinking: conservatives want to protect children, liberals want to protect trees. Children are more important than trees. The implication is that if you are concerned about saving trees, you may be mistaken for an abortion-promoting liberal.

Readers will notice the false dichotomy. Does one need to choose between trees and children? The two usually go well together. What happened to our Christian society that we ever thought trees and children were at odds? Or babies and whales? Or jobs and endangered owls?

Further, we have embraced this false dichotomy—human versus environmental flourishing—with moral compromise elsewhere. We criticize liberal idolization of Mother Earth above humans and in so doing, we overestimate human activities, becoming comfortable with what the Church has historically opposed: greed. Economic growth is dear to the heart of the American church, and we Christians may agree with James Carville’s assertion, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

We may not think of greed, gluttony, and the environment as a place where classical education can help us. We are partly right. Dante speaks to greed, certainly, when he pins repentant souls to the ground in Purgatory for their attachment to worldly goods. But most pre-Industrial writers are not concerned with habitat preservation. We need post-Industrial voices to address post-Industrial concerns. And we need to hear Christian voices because those are the ones we respect; however correct Jane Goodall may be about chimpanzees, we don’t trust her theosophy, so we easily discount her.

Wendell Berry is both post-Industrial and Christian, and many Circe readers are familiar with him. His hard-hitting essay, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation” proclaims that “the certified Christian seems just as likely as anyone else to join the military-industrial conspiracy to murder Creation.” But such a Christian is not a biblical Christian, at least not when it comes to trees and owls. Throughout his essay, Berry cites a range of verses, from Deuteronomy to Psalms to Romans. In short, all of Scripture proclaims that the entire Creation (not just saved human souls) is holy: “our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God’s gifts into his face.” The Scriptures contain “none of the industrialist’s contempt or hatred for nature. We find, instead, a poetry of awe and reverence and profound cherishing.”

Another Christian and post-Industrial voice is that of Dorothy L. Sayers, who wrote in the 1940s, several decades before Berry. Most of us know Sayers from her article “The Lost Tools of Learning” and her translation of Dante. Sayers’s interests, however, went far beyond the literary. In her essay, “The Other Six Deadly Sins,” she points out two disturbing concepts of the modern economic mindset. The first is that, to our shame, we have called good what is bad. Specifically, we have masked the deadly sin of Greed as Enterprise. Enterprise is an exciting sin: “it gambles and speculates; it thinks in a big way; it takes risks. It can no longer be troubled to deal in real wealth and so remain attached to work and the soil.”

Sayers points out that Enterprise goes hand-in-glove with another aspect of our modern economy: planned obsolescence. We do not buy to keep. We buy to use and throw away. That’s how the economy keeps going. Listen to her statement, written long before our phone-upgrade-era: “You must not buy goods that last too long, for production cannot be kept going unless the goods wear out, or fall out of fashion, and so can be thrown away and replaced by others.” Planned obsolescence has shaped nearly everything about our twenty-first-century society: we drink water from plastic water bottles, use disposable forks at restaurants, and have no means of repairing our toaster ovens, even if we wanted to (speaking from personal experience).

In another essay, “Why Work?” Sayers recalls the days before World War II, when a bustling economy produced a tremendous amount of waste.

Can you remember…the stockings we bought cheap and threw away to save the trouble of mending? The cars we scrapped every year to keep up with the latest fashion in engine design and stream-lining? The bread and bones and scraps of fat that littered the dustbins–not only of the rich but of the poor? The empty bottles that even the dustman scorned to collect, because the manufacturers found it cheaper to make new ones than to clean the old?

What would Sayers say about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? Or the exportation of trash to poorer countries without the infrastructure to process it? I imagine she would say that the Church should take care of its own trash and not export it. To do otherwise would be to succumb to sloth, yet another deadly sin.

After all, humans and creation are in this together. “If we follow Christ,” Sayers says elsewhere, “we shall then have the whole universe on our side and shall be cooperating with the nature of things.” For the Christian, there is no such thing as “human flourishing,” because we are not at war with other creatures. There can only be flourishing if we join with (rather than endanger, pollute, or bulldoze) the rest of creation in praise of our Creator.

Like many people, I appreciate steak and fun gadgets, and I know trees must sometimes be cut down. What Berry and Sayers are asking is not that the Church renounce all new things, but that she considers more than just the financial or moral cost of a product—that as a good steward, she counts the cost to God’s creation, as well.